Shenmue

Korean modder Kid Nocon began his unofficial HD remake of the original Shenmue last year, before any of us knew that Shenmue 3 would burst onto the scene and become the most funded video game Kickstarter yet.
Nocon's o...

Most funded video game in site's historyThe crowdfunding campaign for Shenmue 3 has drawn to a close, raising a total of $6,333,295.
That sum makes the project the most funded video game campaign in the history of Kickstarter, beating out the previous record holder...

In case you hadn't heard, Corey Marshall, the English voice actor for Shenmue's Ryo Hazuki, is returning to voice the character in Shenmue 3. As of this week, Masaya Matsukaze has been confirmed as well, meaning both the orig...

Jul 16 //
Chris Carter
Lack of transparency
When Shenmue 3 was announced during E3, the whole world (myself included) went crazy. Series creator Yu Suzuki was teasing it a day before, but no one really could have expected it given how long the series had been on hiatus. Then the questions starting coming, and things got a little more complicated.
It came out the day after the announcement that even though the team was asking for money on Kickstarter, Sony would be funding the game. I kind of feel bad for Suzuki as he had to apologize for "misleading" people, but the entire "Sony is funding some of it, but we're not actually going to tell you how much" business was a bit weird. That's definitely something that should have been explained at E3.
If there's one thing we learned about backers over the years, it's that they want an idea of what they're contributing to, and where their money is going. With Shenmue 3, there are still some doubts though in terms of the latter point Yu Suzuki has confirmed that all of the campaign proceeds are going directly to the game, and not Sony.
Stretch goal wackiness
Yes, one of their stretch goals, one they haven't reached yet, is actually a "new Kickstarter [cash] record." I'm speechless.
While the campaign runners did end up catching on to the concept of stretch goals, it took them days to scramble to come up with ideas. At first, the campaign only had a mere few mentions of what they'd do if they surpassed their funding amount.
The days of "let's just see how much we get on Kickstarter and be surprised later!" are over. Campaigns need to think about the big picture and keep the train running with constant engagement and new goals and activities. IGA's Bloodstained campaign did this impressively, with multiple social media metagames and daily stretch goal updates. Maybe the Shenmue team can up their funding with a good post-Kickstarter PayPal campaign and reach that lofty $10 million mark.
Of course, a lot of future Kickstarter success is going to be contingent on luck and timing. Having Sony announce Shenmue 3 during its E3 press conference did wonders for the campaign, yet Inafune is struggling to have lightning strike twice with Red Ash -- his unofficial Mega Man Legends project, announced at Anime Expo.
The Shenmue 3 team has your money -- now we just wait for the finished product. As for myself, I backed it at the $29 level. Shenmue means a lot to me as a series, and it got me through some really tough times. If the campaign was handled a bit better and was more focused, I may have upped my pledge.

But everyone loves Shenmue so it's okayThe Shenmue 3 Kickstarter has surpassed five million in funding with just under a day and a half to go, but creator Yu Suzuki has insisted that they need roughly $10 million to have a fully realized open world.
It's shooting for the stars for sure, but a number of different choices could have been made to bump the campaign up significantly.

While Yu Suzuki may need $10 million to see a "fully realized open world Shenmue 3," he notes that $5 million is good enough to accomplish most of what he set out to do. And it looks like that's what he'll get, as Shenm...

I'm a sucker for 8-bit productions like this Mega Man themed Shenmue tale from animator Peter Sjöstrand. It has everything you could want, from a Rush forklift section, to capsule toys, to the hellish "sl...

Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us concept artist, John Sweeney, has produced an exclusive print to support the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter.
There are eight large prints (24H x 47W) and 100 smaller prints (16H x 31...

While I have my reservations about the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter, which is still not even halfway towards a "true open world," folks have thrown money at it with aplomb. Over the weekend, perhaps spurred by a false sense of freed...

I haven't been following Shenmue 3 too closely on Kickstarter, but my fingers are crossed for director Yu Suzuki. I hope the project turns out the way he envisions it and fans are satisfied (as if that's even possible). Today...

The voice actor who played Ryo in the English versions of Shenmue 1 and 2, Corey Marshall, has been confirmed for Shenmue 3.
"We would all like to thank Corey-san for coming back," says an announcement on the Shenmue 3 K...

[Sup Holmes is a weekly talk show for people that make great videogames. It airs live every Sunday at 4pm EST on YouTube, and can be found in Podcast form on Libsyn and iTunes.]
What a wacky coincidence! ...

Shenmue 3's existence is pretty neat. Its presence on a major publisher's stage show to hock a Kickstarter is less neat, to me. Obviously the $2 million goal (and $3.5 million raised at time of writing) would not be enough fo...

A few hours after Shenmue 3 was revealed for the PC and PS4 at Sony's conference in Kickstarter form, and all of the tears of screams of joy were over and done with, a lot of people collectively realized -- two mill...

Hoping for a Dreamcast stretch goalOne of the bombs dropped last night during Sony's press conference was that Shenmue 3 was coming, if the Kickstarter succeeded. It was a tough journey, but after a harrowing handful of hours, the project managed to ...

Hell froze over 3 times tonight
It's already been a heck of a night for games that we never thought we'd see happen -- The Last Guardian, a Final Fantasy 7 remake, and now Shenmue 3 on Kickstarter. Yu Suzuki, creator of Shenmue, Outrun, and many ...

As I've told people many times before, Shenmue II was a near-religious experience for me. I remember nearly every minute I spent with it at launch on the original Xbox, and it came at a perfect time in my life when I rea...

The main Shenmue theme still gets me all teary-eyed. After watching these videos of a fan-made HD remake, it happened again! Korean Shenmue fan Nokon Kid has crafted some of the original game in HD, and he's done a...

At Yu Suzuki's GDC postmortem of Shenmue, he fully detailed the classic Dreamcast game's development, from an early prototype to a Virtua Fighter RPG to its final beloved form. Many details, images, and concepts were shown for the first time ever, which was a total thrill for me as a huge fan of the game and Suzuki's other works.

Yu Suzuki took the very first question after his GDC Shenmue postmortem just now, probably knowing exactly what would be asked.
You can guess the question.
Suzuki replied, "Of course I want to make one if I have the rig...

With the end of the year approaching, Sega let loose a nice surprise for fans on their Twitter page. Sonic & All-Stars Racing: Transformed is chock full of references and fan service, and now we can expect the return of S...

Game creator and videogame legend Yu Suzuki will deliver a postmortem on Shenmue at GDC 2014. GDC says that he'll be talking for the very first time about this classic game, starting from its origins as a Virtua Fighter-base...

Will Ryo ever become a full-time Lucky Hit employee?French reporter Sebastien-Abdelhamid recently interviewed Yu Suzuki, creator of the Shenmue series at the Monaco Anime Game Show, and has a bit of a bomb to drop on us.
Apparently, Suzuki may entertain the idea of crowdfundin...

Hey. It's late on a Tuesday night. We're about to enter the mid-week hump. It's time for some f*ckin' kung fu action up in here, am I right?
Here is a very simple yet effective video from José Cardona. He though to hi...

Jul 17 //
Allistair Pinsof
Whenever I think of Deus Ex I think of Chinatown. Foggy interiors of an Asian shrine were the first images I saw of the game in PC Gamer magazine, and the alleys, vendors, and gondolas below are the lasting images that come to mind when I recall the game. The Unreal Engine, still new at the time, made large exteriors, populated city streets, and mood lighting possible. Being able to interact with civilians and watch them live their lives -- regardless of how limited those “lives” may be -- was a rare thing at the time. Seeing signs with giant characters above and vendor goods spread out on tables all around set a tone and sense of place for Deus Ex’s futuristic Hong Kong. Though the game took the player to New York, Paris, and other major cities, Hong Kong was the most fully realized of them all, even if it was the smallest in size.Looking back, it’s almost laughable to think I was once so impressed with the layout. Deus Ex made Hong Kong look more like a warehouse with a couple alleys that extend to clubs and a harbor than a bustling metropolis. Though developer Ion Storm took a great leap forward in creating a virtual city, its lack of detail and scope makes it feel a bit cheap when compared to modern games. The vendors look like cardboard homes, neon lights are far and few between, and the city backdrop is generic and shallow. Despite being dated, Deus Ex’s Hong Kong still evokes a mood and has a charm to it. It’s representative of Ion Storm’s fantastic level and art designers as well as the hardware limitations of the time that could only render so much space and detail at a time.
In Shenmue II’s transition from a humble Japanese city to the sprawl of Hong Kong, little was sacrificed in detail and a lot was added in scope. Shenmue lacks the mood and lighting of Deus Ex, but it makes up for it in terms of size. At the start of Shenmue, you can see large ships sailing out from Hong Kong’s harbor, rundown alleyways with seedy characters, and vendors on the street with detailed goods. At a time when Grand Theft Auto 3 gave players little to do and look at when on foot, Shenmue II overwhelmed the player with distractions, mini-games, and visual detail among the streets of its depiction of Hong Kong. While Shenmue’s Hong Kong highlights the city's English colonial influence, it lacks the bright lights and spectacle that the city has embraced over the last century. The glamour that many have identified with the city is nowhere to be found in Shenmue’s quaint city streets. This was due to the limitation of the Dreamcast’s hardware that struggled to create the long streets of Hong Kong and populate it with more than 5-7 people on-screen at a time.
Showering the cityscape with complex neon lighting was beyond the scope of the Dreamcast’s capabilities, and Sega wasn’t going to recreate the game from the ground up for Xbox. Nevertheless, Shenmue recreated Hong Kong with a scale never seen before at the time.
I can hear you just fine: I know Yakuza takes place in Japan which is more than a mere stone’s throw away from Hong Kong. Nevertheless, Tokyo mirrors Hong Kong’s blend of cramped, industrial spaces and scenic, spacious areas throughout the city. When you weren’t directly dealing with the citizens and language in Yakuza, it was easy to imagine you were walking the streets of Hong Kong. Shenmue II’s textures benefited from the Xbox port, but Yakuza was the first open-world game that took place in modern Asia, specifically designed for this generation of hardware. Playing Yakuza, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that members of Shenmue II’s development team worked on this new Sega series. Yakuza was the first game to bring an Asian metropolis to life with an abundance of neon signs, giant buildings, and intricate city streets that made up a convincing vision of Tokyo’s red-light district. The series improved over time, but this first entry left the biggest impression for being so different than anything else at the time.Like the above games, Yakuza couldn’t display very many pedestrians at a time (roughly 25 or so), making one of the most populated cities in the world feel like a ghost town. The streets themselves were bare, lacking the street vendors, street musicians, and other street-level detail of Shenmue. Nothing but vending machines, faceless pedestrians, and thugs on these streets. Released late in the PlayStation 2’s life, Yakuza used the system’s hardware to add detail to the buildings and neon lights above while leaving the streets below empty. Even still, seeing a city street lined with flashing signs was a sight to behold in 2005.
Nothing could make the technological jump from the original Deus Ex clearer than a return visit to Hong Kong during second half of Human Revolution’s story. Ok, so it’s not really Hong Kong; it’s a city called Hengsha, but it might as well be Hong Kong. Built on a heavily modified Crystal Engine -- which powered Tomb Raider: Legend and its sequels -- Human Revolution was able to bring more space, detail, and dynamic lighting to the city. In contrast to Hong Kong in the original, Hengsha is a much grimier setting with desolate living spaces, sketchy clubs, and armed guards suppressing the locals. It lacks the charm and character of the original, but it’s very impressive on a technical level. Being able to run along the rooftops and look down on a sea of pedestrians and vendors below is a great display of how much technology has advanced since the original Unreal engine. It’s a shame then that the game’s divisive art direction makes such a potentially unique setting look so much like the ones before it in the game: more gold and black tinted cement.
Walking out of a small, dingy diner and into a narrow alleyway, crowded by vendors, pedestrians, and bright neon advertisements is a special moment in Sleeping Dogs. The key word above is “crowded”. Just as Deus Ex once blew me away by having pedestrians at all, Sleeping Dogs impressed me by having enough details and foot traffic to make its world feel realistic and not like the cheap virtual attractions of the past. Whether you are driving by the monoliths of central Hong Kong or walking the streets of the city's various districts, there is a lot to take in and admire in its layout and intricacies. Square Enix have recreated the entire island of Hong Kong and even portions of its surrounding islands. Whether you are racing down the winding roads of Victoria Peak, walking through the fish markets in the day, or driving past the dense urban areas at night, the city of Hong Kong will always be visible and accessible to the player. With advanced lighting, anti-aliasing, and draw distance on PC, Sleeping Dogs might finally give us virtual tourists the trip to Hong Kong we’ve always been dreaming of. Maybe we’ll even take out a triad or two in the process.
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Do you remember the Tomato Convenience Store jingle from the Shenmue games on Sega Dreamcast? Of course you do, as it's impossible to forget the song. If you're anything like me, you spent most of the game just standing in o...

An anonymous tipster close to operations at Sega tells Gamerzine that both Dreamcast titles Shenmue and Shenmue II have been updated to HD, and have been finished for "well over a year," taunting us with by saying that "Shenm...

Jet Set Radio is yet another Dreamcast game that's destined to appear on digital distribution platforms, and at this point, I have to wonder how much further Sega is willing to go. In a recent interview with Gamereactor, the ...

Yu Suzuki, creator of the beloved Shenmue series, believes that his studio could finagle the rights away from SEGA. If possible, he could finally make the Shenmue III that fans have ached for over the years.
"Shenmue's licens...

Aww. I swear, Shenmue is cursed.
Japanese social game Shenmue City only lasted about a year. Series creator Yu Suzuki directed the free-to-play mobile title, and it was slated to come to web browsers, but the ...